Survey: Help Us Understand Corporate Culture

Carolin Oelschlegel is a director of the Katzenbach Center for Strategy&. She co-leads the global operations of the center and advises clients around the world on culture and leadership topics. Based in San Francisco, she is a director with PwC US.

If you were asked to describe your organization’s culture in one word or a single phrase, what would you say? Innovative? Stagnant? Cumbersome? Supportive? It’s complicated?

Culture is made of instinctive, repetitive habits and emotional responses, which can’t be easily pinned down. It’s constantly self-renewing and slowly evolving. It weaves its way in and out of topics as far-reaching as innovation, psychology, neuroscience, and good old-fashioned HR tactics.

At its best, corporate culture energizes employees and makes them feel good about working to advance a company’s goals, according to Jon Katzenbach, author of several books on organizational culture, leadership, and teaming, and founder of the Katzenbach Center, the innovation center for organizational culture and leadership with Strategy&, PwC’s strategy consulting business. At its worst, he says, culture can be a drag on productivity, undermining a company’s long-term success. Chances are, your company’s culture falls somewhere in the middle.

Photograph by Stefan Dahl Langstrup / Alamy

In short, it is complicated — and there is still a great deal to be discovered. That’s where you come in. The Katzenbach Center is launching its Global Culture Survey (the survey is now closed), and we would like you to participate.

The survey seeks to shed light on specifics about how culture evolves in an organization.

The survey seeks to explore how culture is viewed, its role in successful transformations, and what differences and similarities may exist in cultures across industries, geographic regions, and management levels. The survey will also look at the future of work, the forces that shape work, and implications for organizational culture. In participating in the survey, you’ll be contributing to the development of this important knowledge base.

All responses will be kept confidential, and the survey should take about five minutes to complete. In return for completing the survey, you will receive the following:

A free one-year digital subscription to the award-winning strategy+business magazine

An invitation to a webinar detailing the survey results

Entrance into a drawing to win a signed copy of The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization, by Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith (Harvard Business Review Press; reprint ed., 2015)

Entrance into a drawing to win a complimentary 30-minute phone consultation with Jon R. Katzenbach

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